The people who didn't detest poacher John Graybill loved him, but no matter their views on his behavior they all expected he'd someday end up dead in an airplane crash. Graybill loved to fly. He loved to shoot Alaska big game, too, and he wasn't too particular about how he did it.

"He was the worst poacher we ever had,'' said retired Alaska fish and wildlife trooper Wayne Fleek.

That is not an easy distinction to claim in a state notorious for its bandit guides and outlaw hunters. Graybill was a sometimes thief, too; and a Chugiak plumber, and all-around nice guy who nobody wanted to see die in an airplane crash, even though they always knew in their heart of hearts that he would.

"It didn't surprise me,'' Fleek said. "No, it didn't surprise me."

"I would think that even the guys who chased him would be sad to see him go,'' added old Graybill friend Ken Deardorf, of McGrath.

Alaska outlaw and adventurer?

It was just north and east of the small, Interior community of McGrath, on the banks of the Kuskokwim River, that Graybill, 79, met his death, along with his wife, 78-year-old Dolores May or "Dolly'', on Aug. 12. No one is certain what happened there in the Sunshine Mountains other than that the plane the couple was flying in slammed into the ground. The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating. But the belief of many is that Graybill, who'd cheated the weather more than once in a small plane, finally flew into the storm from which he couldn't fly out.

"At his age, it could have been anything,'' Deardorf said. "But there was a guy flying with him who said he turned around because of the weather. I'm not even sure where he was going. I would guess he was heading up into the Alaska Range to go sheep hunting."

"I haven't talked to John in a long, long time," he added.

Graybill had moved on to new friends, most of them younger than Deardorf, all of them younger than Graybill. Cruise the Internet now, and there are a lot of folks half his age or younger singing his praises as an Alaska outlaw and adventurer.

Time has been kind to John Graybill. There is a nostalgia for the days when a man could do whatever the hell a man wanted to do in the north.

John and Dolly were eulogized in their old, hometown newspaper, the Dexter Leader in Michigan. "John's compassion for others and the great state of Alaska is what made him the remarkable man he became," family friend Lynda Boham was quoted as saying.

"The Graybills spent the early years of their marriage and raised their children in Dexter,'' the newspaper added. "The family moved to Alaska in 1968, and John became 'one of the finest Bush pilots in the world.'"

Many are those who would attest to the skills of John Graybill at the stick and rudder of a single-engine airplane. But to call him a Bush pilot -- someone who flies commercially for hire -- is a bit of a misnomer.

Graybill sometimes flew for hire, but it often wasn't exactly legal.

'He wasn't going to let the state get another of his airplanes'

Steve Reynolds, a retired state fish and wildlife trooper and author of the book, "Beyond the Killing Tree'' remembers when game wardens caught Graybill with a German hunter illegally flown to the edge of Katmai National Park and Preserve to kill a moose.

It was a standard sort of Graybill hunt: Fly around, find an animal, land, shoot it. The practice -- called same-day airborne hunting -- had once been legal in Alaska, but largely came to an end in the 1970s as wildlife populations spiraled downward. It had been illegal for quite some time when King Salmon-based wildlife trooper Dick Dykema flew over Graybill and the German who had killed a moose. Graybill spotted the warden's plane almost immediately.

"He just shakes his fist at Dick,'' Reynolds said.

Dykema, for his part, throttled back, opened the plane's window, and yelled out at Graybill that the authorities were coming to get him. Graybill's response, Reynolds said, was to pour gasoline on his nearby airplane, trail a finger of gas back away from the craft, and then put a match to it.

"He wasn't going to let the state get another of his airplanes,'' Reynolds said.